AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

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Thursday, July 31, 2014

Whenever Israel has chosen to use aggression to intimidate its
neighbours in the West Bank, Lebanon or, as it is doing today, in the Gaza
Strip, it has always left itself wriggle room to back off when public opinion
and, more importantly, US and Western support seemed to be running against them.

It has done this by progressively escalating their assaults on their
enemies by pretending to be the victim when their enemies retaliate. That way
they can always tell the world via their well-oiled global propaganda machine
that they are merely responding to attacks being made against them by
‘terrorists that hate Jews’. They claim that they only want peace and that
their assaults against the Palestinians are purely defensive and designed to
deter attacks against them. They tell the world that their assaults are
designed to eliminate or minimise civilian deaths and injuries and are aimed
only at military targets. They claim that, when civilians are killed and wounded,
it is because the place where they have been killed or wounded was being used
by ‘terrorists’ who have deliberately used the civilians in the area as ‘human
shields’ in order to avoid having their weapon placements being hit.

However, when one delves into the histories of Israeli’s various
conflicts with their Palestinian and Arab neighbours, a different reality
emerges.

Rather than retaliating against rocket attacks by Palestinian fighters,
as is claimed in this latest round of extreme violence, Palestinian fighters in
the Gaza Strip were actually responding to shooting attacks against unarmed
Palestinian civilians by the Israelis who have used snipers to kill at least
five innocent Palestinian civilians, including a 58-year-old mentally ill woman
who had wandered too close to the border fence with Israel. More than 60 other
Palestinian civilians have also been wounded by Israeli snipers as they worked
in the fields near the border. These attacks against Gazan civilians have been
for the express purpose of goading the Palestinian fighters into retaliating by
firing rockets into Israel which, in turn, then provides Israel with an excuse
to attack the Gaza Strip on the pretext of stopping the rockets.

In the past when Israel has launched major attacks against Hamas,
Israel has always used the same tactic whereby they attack and keep attacking until
at some point world public opinion causes the Israelis to agree to a ceasefire.

But this time around, the circumstances of the fighting have provided
Israel with an opportunity to press on with the fight as they see the
possibility of actually realising their dream of retaking the Gaza Strip with
the ultimate aim of pushing out the Palestinians and reoccupying it and eventually
annexing it to Israel. There have been a number of factors that have produced
these circumstances. Firstly, while Netanyahu has always been sensitive to
public opinion, his government today has a number of senior ministers and
officials in it who are even more right-wing than he is. They are the ‘don’t
care what the rest of the world thinks’ faction of the Israeli government who are
quite openly advocating a full invasion and occupation of the Gaza Strip and
the complete destruction of Hamas and their allies by either killing or
capturing all of them and/or forcing them to flee out of the Gaza Strip. This
would be the first step toward reoccupying the territory with Israeli civilians.
Secondly, Netanyahu’s aggressive stance this time around has very strong support among Israelis, 80% of
whom support his actions against the
Palestinians. Also working in Netanyahu’s favour is Hamas’s insistence that any
ceasefire will be accompanied by assurances that the Gaza Strip will have its
blockade against it lifted and that it will be able to trade freely with
Israel, Egypt and internationally via an internationally monitored seaport and
airport. Hamas is hoping that popular worldwide support for their demands will
persuade international leaders, especially in the US and Europe, to push Israel
for a ceasefire and an agreement that features Palestinian demands. Israel, on
the other hand, is looking for nothing less than the full destruction of Hamas
and has made it clear that they will not be acceding to Hamas’s conditions for
a ceasefire. Netanyahu will likely take full advantage of the unprecedented
support he has gained from the Israeli people.

During the course of this round of violence, Netanyahu has steadily
ramped up the assaults against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and
particularly on Gaza city itself and the surrounding neighbourhoods. The bombing
and shelling has become increasingly more indiscriminate with civilians being
deliberately targeted as they seek shelter in hospitals and schools after their
homes had been destroyed. Civilian infrastructure is also being increasingly
targeted as the recent destruction of the Gaza Strip’s only electric power
generating plant has demonstrated.

As the destruction of the Gaza Strip gathers pace the Israeli
propaganda machine has been hard at it spinning the increasingly most
outrageous and obviously transparent lies that would be laughable if not for
the tragedy they are attempting to cover up or blame others for. The Israelis
have even accused Hamas of bombing their own hospitals and schools and killing
their own children and other civilians in spite of independent witnesses
confirming that the Israelis were responsible for the death and destruction of
these people and facilities.

Netanyahu has stated that the Israeli Defence Forces will not rest
until every tunnel has been destroyed and all of the rockets found and
destroyed. In making such a statement and knowing that an operation of that
magnitude will likely take some considerable time, he has clearly indicated
that Israel has no intention of leaving the Gaza Strip anytime soon – if,
indeed, ever.

Netanyahu is very much aware of the world’s reaction to the onslaught
that is taking place in the Gaza Strip. He has seen the massive pro-Palestine
demonstrations that have taken place around the world and has heard the pleas
from world leaders and the United Nations to end the slaughter but he continues
to ignore them. He gets encouragement from the fact that the US, while calling
for Israel to enter a ceasefire agreement, at the same time stocks up Israel’s
diminishing munitions supplies as well as continuing to supply Israel with the
jet and diesel fuel needed by the Israelis to continue their attacks on the
Gaza Strip and the Gazan people.

Netanyahu thinks he’s on a roll this time around and, with the backing
of the majority of the Israeli people who have succumbed to the propaganda
behind him together with the support of the US, sees no reason to relent in his
aspirations to defeat Hamas and put the Gaza Strip under Israeli control. With
the destruction already wrought in the Gaza Strip coupled with domestic and US
support, Netanyahu may have convinced himself that he has gone beyond the point
of no return and may even believe that it is his manifest destiny to retake the
Gaza Strip and make it a part of Greater Israel once and for all.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Such is the small size of the Gaza Strip, together with the extremely
dense way the enclave is populated, and coupled with the devastating way the
Israelis have destroyed entire neighbourhoods including homes, hospitals,
schools, government buildings and infrastructure as well as the huge loss of
civilian life across much of the entire Strip, the Palestinians can be forgiven
for thinking that total war is being waged against them.

And, as the entire world can see in this day and age of social media,
total war, contrary to anything the Israeli propaganda machine is saying, is
indeed being waged against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

The only means by which the Palestinians can defend themselves is to
give the Israelis a dose of their own medicine by way of deterrence with
whatever meagre weaponry they have at their disposal which comes mainly in the
form of homemade rockets and mortars and lightweight firearms.

When total war is being waged against a people, the people are entitled
to defend themselves by whatever means is at their disposal. The ‘human shield’
meme that the Israelis and their Western supporters like to accuse Hamas of being
guilty of by virtue of defending themselves from within the midst of the
civilian population is hardly valid particularly when total war is being waged
around them and when there is no other place from which one can defend oneself
without exposing yourself to the enemy.

The Israeli
claim that their aim is simply to destroy Hamas rocket launching sites and the
tunnels is merely an excuse to wage total war against the Palestinians in
the Gaza Strip and to completely destroy the entire enclave and deprive the Palestinians
there of anywhere to live forcing them to seek refuge elsewhere. This will then
allow the Israeli to occupy most if not all of the Gaza Strip for the purpose
ultimately of annexing it to Israel and populating it with Israeli’s.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
in an interview on Sunday what his exit strategy from Gaza is,
Netanyahu replied: “Sustainable quiet. I
mean we didn't seek this escalation, Hamas forced it on us. They started
rocketing our cities, steadily increasing the fire”.

The implication here is clear. Netanyahu is saying that Hamas started
the present round of violence between the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and
Israel by lobbing rockets into Israel. The suggestion is that Hamas simply
started firing rockets into Israel in order to provoke the Israelis – for some
unexplained reason – into retaliation.

But this is not the case.

What Netanyahu – together with most of the Western media, conservative
commentariat and other assorted Israeli apologists – have forgotten to mention
is the months of indiscriminate shooting by IDF snipers of unarmed Palestinian
civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that preceded the current crisis.
Israel was not retaliating to unprovoked rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip
but, rather, the Palestinians in the Gaza were retaliating to deliberate
provocation by the Israelis who were murdering Palestinian civilians, one of
whom was a mentally ill woman shot dead by an Israeli sniper. Others were farm
and salvage workers who were in the open areas that were farmed and worked
close to the Israeli security fence.

Israel’s claim that Palestinians had started this round of violence is
a familiar refrain whenever there has been conflict between the two sides. However,
when one examines the chronology of events that has led up to these conflicts,
one finds that invariably it has been Israel that has been the provocateurs.

In just the first two months of 2014 alone, Human
Rights Watch have documented four killings of unarmed Palestinian civilians
by Israeli Defence Force snipers with another 60 having been wounded by
shooting by the IDF firing from the other side of the border fence into the
Gaza Strip. In order to deter the Israelis from shooting Palestinians in the
Gaza Strip and also to encourage the Israelis to lift their crippling blockade
of the enclave – which in itself is a form of provocation – Palestinian fighters
have launched rockets into Israel. It has been just the kind of response the
Israelis have been looking for as it provides them with an excuse to escalate by
bombing and rocketing Hamas targets inside the Gaza Strip.

This method of quiet provocation then retaliation followed by a disproportionate
counter-retaliation by the Israelis who would then claim to be the victims
follows a very familiar pattern for which Israel has a long history. It was
even used by the Israelis to kick start the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel
ultimately occupied the Syrian Heights, which they later illegally annexed and
renamed the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. History
would have us believe, at least according to the Israelis, that it was the Syrians
that started the 1967 war by lobbing artillery shells onto Israeli settlements
close to the demilitarised zone on the border between Syria and Israel at the
Syrian Heights. The reality, as General
Moshe Dayan later confided to a reporter, was something quite different. As
Dayan explained, it was the Israelis that deliberately provoked the Syrians by
pushing bulldozers up the hills into the demilitarised zones in order to get
the Syrians to open fire on them with their artillery pieces. This then
provided the Israelis with an excuse to counter-retaliate by firing on the
Syrian position using tank, artillery and aircraft. (1) As a result of these
actions, the situation eventually escalated and resulted in the Six Day War.

As well as the killings by the IDF of civilians in the Gaza Strip,
there have also been the killings of youths and children in the West Bank over
the past 19 months or so. Some had been involved in stone throwing though they
had never been any real threat to the heavily armed and protected Israeli
occupying forces, but most had not been involved in protests or stone throwing
at all and were innocent bystanders who were deliberately targeted by Israeli
snipers. Some 16 of these killings of Palestinians by the IDF during 2013
alone have been documented. There were also the filmed
killings of two youths shot by Israeli snipers on Nakba Day. Then there were
the killings
of several Palestinian
youths latter
when the Israeli occupying forces were searching for the kidnappers of the three
Israeli settler youths who were latter found murdered. Few of these events get
reported in the Western media but the Western media are quick to widely report
any retaliation from the Palestinians presenting such actions as being
unprovoked and therefore worthy of Israeli retribution as part of the Israeli
right to defend itself. Little, if anything, is ever said about the Palestinians
right to defend themselves.

Ever since the Israelis began taking lands from the Palestinians in
1947 until now they have always used provocation to justify their actions. The
Western world has generally ignored their blatant crimes and has rarely insisted
on the Israelis obeying the various UN resolutions that have been made against
them. Slowly, though, the peoples of the Western world are becoming more aware
of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people and this is happening now
because the media moguls that have control over the mainstream media do not as
yet have control over the social media via the internet. While ordinary people
are able to voice their views to a far wider audience than ever they did before,
so the truth of what is really happening to the Palestinian people will be revealed.
It’s just a matter of time before the Zionist Israelis will eventually have to
answer for their crimes.

The world now knows exactly what the fascists of Israel are really up
to. It’s not about defending themselves, it’s about creating a Greater Israel
at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

There has been much talk of an Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza
Strip these last few days as Israeli tanks and armour together with some 20,000–30,000
Israeli troops amass around the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel;
indeed, Israeli commandoes have already made some incursions into the Gaza Strip clashing with Hamas
fighters in fire-fights. The question is, however, will Israel actually commit
itself to this massive escalation of the crisis and what would be the likely
consequences of such an action?

But the first question one needs to ask is: Why haven’t the Israelis
already invaded the Gaza? What’s been holding them back?

There are several probable answers to that. First, it’s possible that
Netanyahu is simply bluffing and hoping that the mere presence of an Israeli
invading army on the ground and in clear sight of the Palestinians in the Gaza
may be enough to get Hamas to reconsider their position and concede to a
ceasefire. At least this is essentially what Netanyahu is telling the world –
though not quite in so many words. The problem with this scenario is that it
assumes that Israel is merely reacting to Palestinian aggression and simply wants
the rockets to stop when in reality the rockets being launched into Israel were
as a direct result of Israeli aggression toward Palestinian civilians in the
Gaza Strip in the first place. Israeli IDF snipers have for several months
leading up to the present crisis been killing farmers and other civilians who
have been working in fields close to the border fence with Israel. Also killed
was a mentally ill woman who wandered too close toward the fence. In other
words, it has been the Israelis that have deliberately provoked this current
crisis and not the Palestinians as the Western media is portraying.

Another probable reason why Netanyahu has held back from launching a
ground invasion is because he is cautious of both world opinion and knows also that
he lacks full support from the US and Europe leaders – not to mention the
people of the world.

In light of his fear of worldwide public opinion being against him,
Netanyahu may also be waiting for Hamas to actually score a big hit with one of
their missiles which could then possibly swing public opinion and/or world
leader’s opinion enough for him to feel safe in launching an invasion without
too much criticism from them.

Netanyahu is a little cannier than some of his more right-wing ‘don’t
care what the world think’ colleagues in his cabinet who are pressing hard to
launch an invasion. He is genuinely sensitive to world opinion but, at the same
time, desperately wants to be rid of Hamas and the Jihadists so that Israel can
once again fully occupy the Gaza Strip.

It’s likely that Netanyahu is just waiting for the right moment and it’s
possible that that moment might not eventuate.

But then, what if he does decide to invade the Gaza Strip? What then
would be the likely consequences of an invasion?

Such a decision could have catastrophic consequences for the entire
Middle East.

An invasion would likely be resisted by the Palestinians and could also
lead to an uprising of Palestinians in the West Bank – something which the
Israelis might also be hoping for providing them with an excuse to launch a
full-scale occupation there too. This, in turn, might even trigger a response
from international jihadists who would find their way into Jordan and Egypt in
the hope of getting an opportunity to fight against the Israelis. While
unlikely, Hezbollah in Lebanon may even feel inclined to help out by putting
aside their differences with those on the Sunni side of the Arab street;
they’ve done it before. Already rockets have been fired from Lebanon into
Israel, most likely by Palestinian and/or Sunni groups based there.

In the last few days Israel has warned inhabitants of northern Gaza
that they will be increasing their raids on the area and have told civilians to
leave prior to commencement of bombing sorties. This has led to a mass exodus
of civilians fleeing north Gaza and heading south. Such methods of getting
Palestinians to flee their homes are reminiscent of how Jewish fighters ethnically
cleansed Palestine in the first place in order to create Israel. One wonders if
history is repeating itself.

The Gaza Strip is teetering on a knife edge. One of two things will end
up happening; either Israel will invade and permanently occupy the Gaza Strip
and hope that at least a large proportion of the Gazan people seek refuge in
the Sinai or Jordan or there will be no invasion, a peace somehow brokered and
then a return to the status quo for another two or three years until the next
time some extreme right-wing Israeli premier feels the time is right to yet
again provoke the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip in the hope that this time the
world will support the Israeli take over of the occupied territories.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Neoconservative master propagandist Jonathan Tobin
writing in Commentary today says about the current crisis that “Hamas
set events in motion last month when some of its operatives kidnapped and
murdered three Israeli teenagers and then escalated the conflict by shooting
several hundred rockets into the Jewish state from its Gaza stronghold”.

Rubbish.

It was Israel that set events in motion when IDF snipers shot dead
Gazan civilians during the months preceding the current crisis. A number of
those randomly murdered were farmers tending fields close to the border with
Israel. One of the dead was a mentally ill woman who was shot dead after
wandering too close to the fence separating the Gaza from Israel.

On top of that, there is no evidence that Hamas had anything to do with
the killings of the three Israeli youths murdered in the West Bank.

Also ignored by Tobin are the deaths of five Palestinian youths shot
dead in the West Bank by Israeli snipers before the three Israeli killings.
While I’m not suggesting here that one set of deaths in any way justifies
another set of deaths, I am saying that it is important to present the chronology
of events in the correct order before anyone attempts to pervert reality with
outright lies.

Friday, July 11, 2014

As part of its propaganda against Israel’s enemies, Israeli and neoconservative
propagandists like to present Palestinian fighters as cowards that hide behind
so-called ‘human shields’.

Neoconservative propagandist Jonathan
Tobin, for example, today writes that, “having decided to escalate another
round of violence by launching hundreds of rockets into Israel, the Islamist
group is still hoping to use the presence of Palestinian civilians around
legitimate military targets as a weapon against the Jewish state”. However, as
Tobin concedes, the Gaza Strip is extremely densely populated and, short of
making themselves sitting targets in open fields, Palestinian fighters have no
option but to conduct the defence of their homelands from within the built-up
areas of where they live. It is the nature of urban guerrilla warfare –
especially if the Israelis decide to launch a ground invasion of the Gaza
Strip. Palestinian fighters are hardly going to stand out in open fields with
their AK-47s and RPGs to face Israeli ground attack aircraft and squadrons of
Israeli Merkava battle tanks.

But there is another side to the ‘human shield’ scenario. In fact, it is
not the Palestinian fighters that resort to using human shields; it’s actually
the Israelis who have been
filmed and documented
as having used children as human shields.

Realty is always the opposite of Zionist and neoconservative
propaganda.

As missiles and rockets fly from the Gaza Strip ever further into
Israel, the Israeli government are seeing support in Israel for action against
Hamas increasing. It’s just what the “don’t care what the world thinks” faction
of the Israeli extreme right wants to see. It strengthens their argument for
calling on Netanyahu to launch a full-on invasion of the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank in order to wipe out Hamas completely.

Netanyahu, however, remains reluctant to go the full distance just yet,
fearful of world opinion and a continuing lack of support for such a move from
both Europe and the US. While the US supports “Israel’s right to defend itself”,
Obama has offered his team to act as broker for a ceasefire to deescalate the
tit-for-tat and grossly disproportionate bombings. However, Obama is very unlikely
to support a full-scale invasion of either of the territories.

The Western media who largely support Israel’s stance by insisting that
Israel is defending itself against Palestinian rockets being fired into Israel
have almost entirely ignored the fact that the Palestinians have actually been
firing rockets into Israel as a response to Israeli random sniper shootings of
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and more recently in the West Bank. This round
of the conflict – like all previous wars between the Palestinians and the
Israelis – is not Israel defending itself against rocket attacks from the
Palestinians, but the Palestinians defending themselves against Israeli
persecution, aggression and occupation with whatever weapons they have.

For years the Israelis had got away with presenting themselves to the
world as victims of Palestinian aggression when in fact it has been – and still
is – the Palestinians that have been the victims of Israeli suppression and
ethnic cleansing.

Despite the pro-Israeli Western media’s best propaganda efforts, the
West is slowly waking up to the reality of what is really going on between the
Israelis and the Palestinians. Provocation has been the name of the Israelis
game – followed by loud claims of being the victim when the Palestinians fight
back.

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

It is Israeli internal
political bickering over how to proceed with creating a Greater Israel by
overrunning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the eventual aim of annexing
both territories to Israel that prevents them from doing it right now.

One the one side there’s Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of
the extreme right-wing Beiteinu party and Israeli Economy Minister Naftali
Bennett of the equally right-wing The Jewish Home party, calling for an immediate
invasion of the occupied territories after the murders of the three Jewish
boys, while on the other side there’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu playing
things cautiously and not willing to do anything that is likely to tip world
opinion against Israel any more than it already is by doing anything so rash as
launching a full-on invasion or attack of the occupied territories.

There should be no mistaking Netanyahu’s intentions here; the Likud
party that he leads exists in order to create a Greater Israel but for
Netanyahu it’s all a matter of timing and favourable conditions existing before
he can act. With Obama still President in the US the time is definitely not
now. Netanyahu knows he can’t do anything like invade the Gaza Strip or the
West Bank without having the US one hundred percent behind him just as he can’t
attack Iran without the full support of the US. Netanyahu can provoke and prod
at the Palestinians in order get them to react in such a way as to tip Obama
and public opinion in favour of Israel but he knows he needs to take care as to
how far he can go without it seeming like the provocation is deliberate.

Lieberman and Bennett, and the other fringe dwelling far-right Israeli
groups, however, couldn’t care less about public opinion and believe that they
can achieve their ends using existing Israeli forces and without the help and
support of the US or the Western world.

For now, this political bickering is all there is between the status
quo and full-scale war against the Palestinian people. But one thing is for
dead sure; while the right-wing of Israel dominates Israeli politics, there
will never be an independent Palestinian sovereign state – no matter how much
Netanyahu says he wants to see a two-state solution. He’s just biding his time.

Thursday, July 03, 2014

The recent kidnapping and killings of three Israeli youths in the West
Bank has really brought out the Israeli extremists in all their rampant glory.
David Rubin, a former mayor of Shiloh, Israel, is calling
for the destruction of both Hamas and Fatah and without taking too much
care about who are fighters and who are civilians. This lunatic wants to see
the complete destruction of both Palestinian organisations.

Tuesday, July 01, 2014

There can, of
course, be no moral equivalence in the tit-for-tat killings of Israeli and
Palestinian children such as has occurred in the West Bank these last few
weeks. But, on the other hand, neither can there be any tolerance of the
killings of Palestinian children while the Western world’s press calls for
outrage when the children of Israeli settlers are killed. It’s not so much a
matter of moral equivalence as moral inequivalence. Israel
and the neocons demand the world be outraged by the deaths of three Israeli
children yet condemn those 1523 Palestinians children that have been murdered by Israeli
occupation troops since 2000 as somehow having been deserving of death because they were
throwing stones at the Israeli occupation troops. Go figure.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
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